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Comment by chromatin | Hacker News Reader

We backed out of working with a builder because price went up about $100k over the course of 3 months earlier in 2021. There is no way that was justified , lumber and supply chains notwithstanding. I respect his right to maximize profits in this market, but I won’t be part of it.

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Unfortunately I suspect it'll never be cheaper to build.

Second this. If inflation numbers keep going up 5% per month, the cost of literally everything will keep going up. There are labor shortages in a lot of industries which means employers need to compete on $/hr or workers will go to where they can make more. Not out of spite or greed, it will cost more to feed their family because those costs will have gone up.

This also means the housing prices will probably continue to go up as well.

5% year over year, not per month.

And to clarify... that's 5.3% over last August, when (some) prices were depressed because of the pandemic. Inflation is already slowing down.

Not what I'm seeing. Hot dog buns to cheese, everything that was $2 is $3 right now. I swear everything has whole foods price right now. I don't care what the govt. is tracking they are obviously not in my safeway.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics actually employees quite a few people to call stores across the country and get prices. Planet money interviewed one such person not long ago. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015804773/how-do-you-measure...

The other thing I noticed is that for about a month some items had a price increase of about $1 but at the same time suddenly was "on sale" for $1 off (club card sale). So with the club card you paid the same price as last month. The sale ended two days ago and low and behold what I used to pay 3.50 is now 4.50. I have a feeling if they are calling stores, they are probably giving them the club-card price, so some of these price hikes are delayed.

If someone actually finished working on an inflation database website I would love to enter data for them. I'm seeing spikes across everything I buy in the last 2 months. I feel like the true inflation for food itself is at least 33% in the last 5 months.

My understanding is that the price of food is not generally included in the most-commonly reported version of the CPI for the past few decades. So you could both be right.

Maybe not in nominal terms, but does that really matter?

You realize a massive market crash is coming soon? The quick sugar high from all the stinky $$$ will dry up soon, and then the market will crash. If that happens, expect it to be very cheap to buy a house and a used car when all the people who could barely afford their new car/house find themselves underwater, unemployed, and no longer receiving Covid stimulus checks.

But who knows, maybe the economy will just keep booming forever

They’ve been saying there’s a pending crash for the last five years. I’ve expected it too.

The only thing that happens is soon as the market gets skittish, the fed prints money. They seem to be so scared of a recession, or maybe, the poets that be are so leveraged up themselves, that they will do whatever it takes to prevent a crash.

My thought is, don’t be so leveraged that you’re the first to collapse when things go down. If things continue collapsing, the fed will step in and fix everybody still standing.

Try for the past 10 years. 2011 was a big recovery year and people were still screaming about a "double dip recession" coming.

20 years of continuous growth in Australia, with economists predicting a bubble burst every year. I believe we've had 2 quarters over those 20 years that didn't see growth.

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